The Interview Databases
For the study, sixty-six informants from twenty families were interviewed in the Päijät-Häme district in Finland in 2004, while about sixty-nine individuals from fifteen families were interviewed in Thunder Bay, Canada, between 2009 and 2013 (see Table 3.1).
These interviews were mostly thematic and semi-structured, with several generations of the same family being interviewed together or separately. In Canada, students were interviewed as a group at Lakehead University. Most of the interviews were conducted in the homes of the informants, all the interviews were recorded, and most were later transcribed. The quantitative and qualitative content analysis were carried out using Atlas/ti software. Following the Finnish law, all informants are unidentified.Table 3.1 Number of the informants in Finland and Canada by generation and sex
The division of generations followed the ideas of a social generation, a large age cohort that was born in certain similar contextual circumstances and lived through the same economic, social, and political processes. The members of a social generation have joint life experiences and shared memories of these experiences (Karisto 2005, 25). In this study, thirty-year birth cohorts were adopted to construct the generations because the age variation of the members of the three biological generations was huge. The first generation was born in 1911–1940, the second in 1941–1970, and the third in 1971–1995.
The generations are labelled by the key experiences of the whole age cohort or by the special conditions they lived through. The first generation (born 1911–1940) is the ‘nationalistic generation’. In many ways, the life-courses of this generation have been closely connected to the history of the Finnish nation, and their personal narratives ranged over such events as the Finnish Civil War, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Finnish Winter and the Continuation Wars, and the period of post-war reconstruction.
The second generation (born 1941–1970), which was named the ‘network generation’, is the enlarged baby boomer generation, born during or after World War II. It is a generation that encountered the world via supranational modes of media and culture, and it largely casts away narrow, nationalistic mindsets. To keep the real biological generations together, this generation also covers people born in the 1960s, who are usually included in the so-called Generation X that followed the real baby boomers.
The third generation (born in 1971–1995) is the ‘urban generation’. It is the first generation to live mostly in truly urban contexts, both in the homeland and abroad (Naming of the generations, see Häkkinen 2013, 47–53). The numbers of the informants are shown in Table 3.1.